People have lived on these islands for a very long time: in Callao Cave, in northern Luzon, remains of a hominin, Homo luzonensis, dating back some 67.000 years were found, and in the Tabon Caves, on Palawan, human bones around 47.000 years old. Against that distant backdrop, the first to arrive were the Negrito groups, hunter-gatherers related to today's Aeta and Ati. But the big transformation came with the Austronesians, seafarers originally from Taiwan who, from around 2200 BC, reached the Batanes Islands and northern Luzon and from there spread across the whole archipelago, bringing rice farming, pottery, weaving and open-sea navigation.
From those Austronesians comes the basic political unit of the pre-colonial country: the barangay. The word derives from balangay, a type of outrigger boat in which the first migrants arrived; over time it came to mean the kinship community, of between thirty and a hundred families, nearly always settled by the coast or a river. Each barangay was headed by a hereditary chief, the datu, who dispensed justice, organised trade and led his people in war. Society was stratified: at the top, the nobility (maginoo); in the middle, the free men who bore arms (timawa or maharlika); at the bottom, dependants and the enslaved (alipin), divided between those bound by debt and those held for life.
There was no unified state and no monumental writing, but these were not isolated communities either: they used their own syllabary, baybayin, produced remarkable gold work and were fully part of Southeast Asia's trade networks. Some coastal barangays came together into larger units — the rajahnates, such as Butuan in Mindanao or Maynila and Tondo on Manila Bay — ruled by rajahs and in direct contact with the great kingdoms of the region. That plural, maritime and decentralised world is what the first Europeans found, without fully understanding it.
Long before 1521, the islands were an active link in the South China Sea trade routes. Chinese merchants of the Song and Ming dynasties brought porcelain, silk and glass beads and took away gold, wax, pearls, tortoiseshell and sea products; archaeologists are still digging up that ceramic ware in graves all over the archipelago. Butuan, in northeastern Mindanao, already appears in 10th-century Chinese chronicles as a trading kingdom that sent embassies to the imperial court. Alongside the Chinese came Malays, Indians, Siamese and, more and more, Muslim merchants.
With those traders came Islam, which took root first in the far south. Around the mid-15th century, a scholar and missionary from Johor, Sharif ul-Hashim, founded the Sultanate of Sulu, which broke away from the Bruneian Empire and came to control the Sulu Archipelago, part of Mindanao and northeastern Borneo. On mainland Mindanao, in the 16th century, Sharif Kabungsuwan, also from Johor, preached Islam and established the Sultanate of Maguindanao. These were organised states, with sultans, Islamic law, fleets and an economy that combined trade, farming and, at their height, raiding and slave trading.
By 1500 Islam was firmly established in Sulu and much of the southern coast, and by 1565 it had reached the Manila area, where Muslim rajahs such as Rajah Sulayman ruled. The difference would be huge: when Spain conquered and Christianised the north and centre, the southern sultanates held out for more than three centuries. That is where the word the Spanish brought from their own history to name these Muslims — 'moros' — comes from, and with it the Bangsamoro identity that still shapes the contemporary history of Mindanao.
On 16 March 1521, the expedition of the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan, sailing for the Spanish Crown in the middle of the first voyage around the world, sighted the mountains of present-day Samar. It was the first documented arrival of Europeans in the archipelago. Magellan made friends with local chiefs, held the first Catholic Mass in the islands at Limasawa and reached Cebu, where Rajah Humabon and many of his people agreed to be baptised. As a symbol of that pact, Magellan gave them an image of the Child Jesus, the Santo Niño, which to this day is the most venerated devotional object in the country.
His enthusiasm led him into a fatal mistake. To show his new allies what he could do, Magellan decided to subdue a chief on the neighbouring island of Mactan, Lapulapu, who refused to recognise the authority of Humabon and the Spanish Crown. Before dawn on 27 April 1521 he landed with about sixty men in shallow water, far from the beach, where his ships' cannons could not cover the troops. Lapulapu's warriors, who greatly outnumbered them, met them with spears, arrows and the large swords called kampilan. Magellan fell there, wounded in the leg and finished off at the water's edge.
According to the expedition's chronicler, Antonio Pigafetta, whose account is the main source for all of this, Magellan died covering his men's retreat. The Philippines remembers Mactan as the first battle a local chief won against the Spanish, and Lapulapu as a founding figure of resistance. The expedition's survivors completed the voyage around the world, but conquest would have to wait: only 44 years later would Spain come back in earnest.
The actual conquest began in 1565, when Miguel López de Legazpi arrived from Mexico with orders to set up a permanent colony. He founded the first Spanish settlement in Cebu and, after years of expansion, in 1571 took Manila — wresting it from the Muslim rajahs — and made it the capital. The archipelago was named 'las Islas Filipinas' in honour of King Philip II. Unlike the Americas, there was little gold and silver here; the big business would be something else: trade.
For 250 years, from 1565 to 1815, the Manila galleon linked Manila with Acapulco, crossing the Pacific once or twice a year. It brought silver from the Mexican and Peruvian mines and carried away the Chinese silk, porcelain and spices that reached Manila from all over Asia. It was the longest trade route in the world and one of the richest, and it tied the Philippines more closely to New Spain — today's Mexico — than to Spain itself; that is why so much Filipino vocabulary, food and religious devotion has a Mexican feel. Manila grew as a walled city, Intramuros, around the cathedral and the convents.
The other great instrument of rule was the Church. Augustinian, Franciscan, Dominican and Jesuit friars evangelised the north and centre of the country with enormous success, and today it is one of only two Catholic-majority states in Asia. The religious orders did more than convert people: they ran towns, built up vast estates and wielded immense political power, often greater than that of the civil authorities. That Church gave identity, schools and hospitals, but over the centuries it also became the most resented symbol of the colonial system. And throughout all that time, the Muslim south — the sultanates of Sulu and Maguindanao — was never truly subdued: the 'Moro wars' were an almost constant conflict.
By the late 19th century, three centuries of rule had produced a new class of Filipinos: the ilustrados, educated young men, often mestizo and well-off, who studied in Manila or in Europe and came back questioning the backwardness, the abuses of the religious orders and the lack of rights. At first many of them did not ask for independence but for reforms: representation in the Spanish Cortes, equality before the law, secularisation of the parishes and an end to the friars' privileges. This was the Propaganda Movement, which campaigned from Spain through the newspaper La Solidaridad.
Its greatest figure was José Rizal, a doctor, polyglot and writer born in 1861. His two novels, Noli me tángere (1887) and El filibusterismo (1891), portrayed the hypocrisy, corruption and abuse of the colonial regime and of parts of the clergy in stark terms, and became political dynamite. In 1892 Rizal returned to the country and founded La Liga Filipina, a civic reform association; a few days later he was arrested and exiled to Dapitan, in Mindanao.
Rizal was a reformer, not a revolutionary: he believed in peaceful, gradual change and was wary of a premature armed uprising. But when the revolution broke out, the Spanish authorities saw him as its intellectual inspiration. He was tried for rebellion and sedition and executed by firing squad in Manila on 30 December 1896, at the age of 35. Far from snuffing out the movement, the execution set it alight: it turned Rizal into a national martyr and made it impossible for Spain to hold on to the islands with any moral authority. Today he is the national hero of the Philippines.
While the reformers called for change from Europe, another Filipino took a more direct path. In July 1892, on the very day Rizal was exiled, Andrés Bonifacio founded the Katipunan in Manila, a secret revolutionary society whose aim was full independence by force of arms. With popular roots and blood-oath rituals, the Katipunan grew underground until, by some estimates, it had around a hundred thousand members. In August 1896 the Spanish uncovered the conspiracy, and the revolution broke out.
The movement caught on strongly in the provinces around Manila, especially Cavite, where a young and militarily successful leader emerged: Emilio Aguinaldo. A rift soon opened between the two leaders: at an assembly in 1897, Aguinaldo's faction prevailed over Bonifacio's, and Bonifacio was tried by his own comrades and executed. That internal conflict cast a tragic shadow over the birth of the nation. Cornered, Aguinaldo agreed that year to a pact with Spain and a temporary exile in Hong Kong in exchange for money and reforms.
The Spanish-American War of 1898 changed everything. The United States, at odds with Spain over Cuba, sent its fleet to Manila and destroyed the Spanish squadron in the bay. Aguinaldo came back, resumed the fight and on 12 June 1898, in Kawit, Cavite, proclaimed the independence of the Philippines. In January 1899 the First Philippine Republic was established in Malolos, with a progressive constitution: it was the first democratic republic in Asia. But Spain had already sold the archipelago to a new owner: under the Treaty of Paris of December 1898 it ceded the Philippines to the United States for twenty million dollars, without consulting a single Filipino.
Filipinos had fought Spain believing they were freeing themselves; they found they had merely changed masters. Once it was clear the United States intended to keep the islands, a clash was inevitable. On 4 February 1899 the Philippine-American War broke out between US troops and Aguinaldo's forces. It was a long and cruel conflict, which officially lasted until 1902 and in some regions, such as the Muslim south, for years more.
The figures are grim and partly disputed: more than 4.200 US soldiers and at least 20.000 Filipino fighters died, but the greatest tragedy fell on the civilian population. It is estimated that hundreds of thousands of Filipinos — figures range from around 200.000 to nearly a million depending on the source — died from violence, hunger and epidemics, especially cholera, made worse by the forced concentration of villages and scorched-earth policies in some campaigns. Episodes such as the Balangiga massacre and the reprisals that followed on Samar left a deep wound. Aguinaldo was captured in 1901 and swore allegiance to the United States.
US rule, which would last until 1946, was different from Spanish rule. Washington invested in a system of English-language public schools, built roads, ports and hospitals, and introduced representative institutions: in 1907 the first Philippine Assembly was elected, and in 1916 the Jones Act promised future independence. English became the language of government and education, and the United States left a cultural imprint that is still alive. But in the end it was another colony: the promise of self-government was fulfilled only bit by bit, and real power stayed in foreign hands and with a local landowning elite.
On 8 December 1941, just hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan invaded the Philippines, then a self-governing commonwealth on its way to independence. The combined US and Filipino forces held out for three months on the Bataan Peninsula and the island fortress of Corregidor, poorly supplied and with no reinforcements, until they surrendered in April and May 1942. General Douglas MacArthur, evacuated to Australia, left behind his famous promise: 'I shall return'.
The surrender of Bataan was followed by one of the most atrocious episodes of the Pacific War: the Bataan Death March. Some 72.000 to 78.000 Filipino and American prisoners were forced to walk dozens of kilometres under the sun, without water or food, to the prison camps; thousands died along the way from exhaustion, thirst and summary executions. The Japanese occupation, which set up a puppet republic, was harsh: there was forced labour, requisitioning, torture and reprisals, but a broad guerrilla resistance also arose and helped the Allied return.
MacArthur kept his word in October 1944, with the landing on Leyte and the largest naval battle in history in the gulf of the same name. The liberation culminated in the Battle of Manila, between February and March 1945, a month of house-to-house fighting that almost completely destroyed the city and in which at least 100.000 civilians died, many of them in massacres carried out by entrenched Japanese troops. Manila, once one of the most beautiful cities in Asia, ended up among the most devastated capitals of the war, second only to Warsaw. The Philippines paid for the Second World War with more than a million dead.
The road to independence had been mapped out before the war. In 1935 the Commonwealth of the Philippines was established, a transitional government led by President Manuel Quezon, with the promise of full sovereignty within ten years. The Japanese occupation interrupted the process but did not cancel it. With the war over and the country in ruins, the United States recognised the independence of the Republic of the Philippines on 4 July 1946, with Manuel Roxas as its first president.
Independence came with conditions that limited its reach. The United States kept large military bases — Clark and Subic — for decades, and trade agreements such as the Bell Act tied the Philippine economy to the American one and gave US citizens parity rights to exploit the country's resources. Reconstruction was slow and uneven, and power stayed, as before, in the hands of a handful of landowning families who controlled the land, Congress and political life.
That inequality fuelled armed conflict. In the fields of central Luzon, where peasants worked land that was not theirs, the communist Hukbalahap guerrillas — who had fought the Japanese — rose up against the new state in a rebellion that marked the 1940s and 1950s. President Ramón Magsaysay managed to partly quell it with reforms and military force. The young republic was born, then, with US-style democratic institutions built on top of a deeply unequal social structure: a tension that would explode two decades later.
Ferdinand Marcos was elected president in 1965 and re-elected in 1969. Intelligent, ambitious and shrewd, at first he pushed public works and projected an image of modernisation. But the 1935 Constitution barred him from a third term, and Marcos had no intention of leaving. On 21 September 1972 he signed Proclamation No. 1081, and two days later he announced on television that he was placing the country under martial law, citing the threat of the communist insurgency and the conflict in the Muslim south.
Martial law put all power in his hands: he dissolved Congress, ruled by decree, shut down media outlets and jailed opponents, among them Senator Benigno 'Ninoy' Aquino. It was fourteen years of one-man rule. Later official commissions and human rights bodies documented thousands of cases of torture, disappearance and extrajudicial killing — in the order of tens of thousands of victims of detention and abuse, with figures still being studied — and a massive plundering of the treasury: the Marcos family and their associates are estimated to have siphoned off between 5.000 and 10.000 million dollars, while foreign debt soared and the economy ended in crisis. This is a painful period, still disputed in Philippine politics, and it is best to stick to what is documented, neither downplaying nor exaggerating it.
The breaking point was the assassination of Ninoy Aquino on 21 August 1983, shot on the tarmac of Manila airport just as he returned from exile. The crime, attributed to elements within the regime, outraged the country and triggered an economic and political crisis that Marcos could no longer control. His widow, Corazon Aquino, became the symbol of an ever-broader opposition.
Under pressure from the crisis and from Washington, Marcos called snap elections for February 1986. His opponent was Corazon Aquino, Ninoy's widow. The count was riddled with fraud: while the official tally gave Marcos the win, a parallel count by civilian observers put Aquino ahead, and election workers walked out live on air, denouncing the manipulation. The country was on the brink of rupture.
At the end of February, two senior military figures — Defence Minister Juan Ponce Enrile and Armed Forces vice chief of staff Fidel Ramos — rebelled and barricaded themselves in two military camps on Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, EDSA, in Manila. Cardinal Jaime Sin went on the radio and called on people to protect them. Between 22 and 25 February 1986, hundreds of thousands and then millions of Filipinos — whole families, nuns, students, priests — poured onto EDSA and formed a human shield in front of the tanks, with flowers, rosaries and songs. The soldiers sent to crack down refused to fire on their own people.
This was the People Power Revolution, EDSA People Power: an essentially peaceful uprising that brought down the dictatorship in four days with barely any bloodshed. On 25 February, Marcos and his family fled to Hawaii on US helicopters, and Corazon Aquino took office as president. The image of an unarmed crowd stopping a regime went around the world and inspired democratic movements in other countries. A new Constitution, in 1987, restored freedoms, limited presidential terms and sought to make sure nothing like it could happen again.
Since 1986, the Philippines has been a noisy, lively presidential democracy, with competitive elections, a combative press and a strong civil society, but also with persistent problems: widespread poverty, inequality, corruption, political patronage and the enormous weight of a few families that dominate the economy and politics. The population has passed 110 million and keeps growing; today the country is one of the most populous in the world and a migration powerhouse: more than ten million Filipinos work abroad —sailors, nurses, domestic workers, engineers— and their remittances hold up a good part of the national economy.
The governments that followed were very different from one another, from the reformism of Fidel Ramos and Benigno Aquino III to the hard-line, controversial presidency of Rodrigo Duterte (2016-2022), whose 'war on drugs' left thousands dead and is under investigation by the International Criminal Court. In 2022, in a turn few saw coming, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the dictator's son, won the presidency by a wide margin, partly thanks to an intense rewriting of the past on social media: a sign of how contested the memory of martial law still is.
The deeper challenges remain open. In the south, after decades of armed conflict, the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao was created in 2019, a peace effort with the former Moro guerrillas that is still finding its footing. In the South China Sea, the Philippines is locked in a constant tug-of-war with China over sovereignty of reefs and islets, with international rulings in its favour that Beijing ignores. And above all there is geography: an archipelago on the Ring of Fire and in the path of typhoons, battered by earthquakes, eruptions and ever stronger storms, which make resilience a way of life. Even so, the Philippines keeps something hard to match: a cheerfulness, a hospitality and an ability to bounce back —the famous spirit of bayanihan, mutual help— that run through its whole history.
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Before the Spanish arrived, at the mouth of the Pasig River there were two prosperous Muslim settlements, Maynila and Tondo, ruled by rajahs and linked to Brunei and to Chinese trade. In 1571, Miguel López de Legazpi took the area and founded the capital of the Philippine Islands there. On top of old Maynila he built Intramuros, the walled city: a stone enclosure with a moat, bastions and Fort Santiago, inside which the Spanish lived, along with the cathedral, the convents, the governor's palace and the first universities in Asia.
For three centuries, Manila was the head of the Spanish empire in the Pacific and the departure point of the galleon that linked it to Acapulco. Around the walls grew the neighbourhoods of the Filipinos and of the huge Chinese community, the sangleyes, merchants and craftsmen who were indispensable and persecuted at the same time, and who suffered several massacres throughout the colonial period. Intramuros concentrated religious and political power; outside the walls beat the mestizo, mercantile city that would become the country's real engine.
Manila also bore tragedy. In the 1945 battle, during the Second World War liberation, the city was destroyed house by house: Intramuros was reduced to rubble and at least 100,000 civilians died. Of the original walled city, almost only Fort Santiago and San Agustín Church, the oldest in the country, survived. Today's Manila —huge, chaotic, vibrant— is a metropolis of more than thirteen million people in its wider urban area, where the skyscrapers of Makati, the working-class districts and the restored stones of Intramuros live side by side as a memory of everything that happened.
In the mountains of the Cordillera, in the northern heart of Luzon, the Ifugao people carved by hand one of the most astonishing feats of agricultural engineering in the world: mile after mile of rice terraces that climb the slopes like giant steps. Those of Banaue are the most famous, but the whole ensemble spans several municipalities in the province of Ifugao. They were built without metal tools or draught animals, moving earth and stone by sheer muscle, with a system of channels that brings water down from the forests at the top.
Popular tradition presents them as two thousand years old, although the most recent archaeological studies question their exact age and place much of the construction in more recent times than was believed; what is beyond doubt is that they are the fruit of knowledge passed down from generation to generation over centuries. In 1995, UNESCO inscribed the 'Rice Terraces of the Philippine Cordilleras' as a living cultural landscape, not only for their beauty but because they express a unique harmony between a community and its mountain surroundings.
The Ifugao were never subdued by Spain: the Cordillera stayed outside colonial rule, and so they kept their religion, their language and their customs —including, in the past, the warrior prestige tied to headhunting— far more intact than the Christianised lowlands. Today the terraces face a modern challenge: ageing farmers, young people migrating to the city, and tourism. Keeping rice alive on the terraces also means keeping a culture alive.
Further north and west, among mists and pines, live the other peoples of the Cordillera, whom the Spanish generically called 'Igorots' (mountain people): the Kankanaey, the Ibaloi, the Bontoc, the Kalinga, the Applai. Sagada, a Kankanaey village perched at more than 1,500 metres, is their best-known corner. Its hallmark is the hanging coffins: wooden coffins fixed to cliff faces or placed in caves, an ancestral funerary custom meant to bring the dead closer to the sky and the spirits, and one that is still practised on a limited scale.
Like the Ifugao, the peoples of the Cordillera resisted the Spanish conquest and kept their autonomy in the highlands. Only with the Americans, in the early 20th century, was the region integrated more effectively, and Baguio was founded as a hill station and summer capital, taking advantage of the cool mountain climate. Gold and copper mining drew companies and workers, and changed part of the area's social landscape.
The Cordillera's recent history has a chapter of struggle. In the 1970s and 1980s, Kalinga and Bontoc communities firmly opposed the Chico River dam project, which would have flooded their lands and ancestral graves. The murder of the Kalinga leader Macli-ing Dulag in 1980 turned that resistance into a symbol of indigenous peoples standing up to large-scale projects, and the project was eventually cancelled. That struggle also gave rise to the demand for regional autonomy that the Cordillera still upholds.
On the northwest coast, in the province of Ilocos Sur, Vigan is the best-preserved example of a planned Spanish colonial town left in Asia. It was founded in 1572 by Juan de Salcedo, Legazpi's grandson, who laid it out on the model of Intramuros. But what makes it unique is not just the Spanish side: Vigan was a great trading port where cultures met. Its mestizo quarter was born from the mixing of Chinese merchants, Spaniards and the local Ilocano population.
That mix can be read in its architecture, which has no parallel. The houses on Calle Crisologo have two storeys, with brick walls, wooden upper floors and balconies, capiz-shell windows and steep tiled roofs reminiscent of the Chinese tradition. They were the homes of mestizo families grown rich on the trade in indigo, tobacco and Ilocano textiles. Vigan prospered as the head town of a region, Ilocos, famous for the hard-working, frugal and enterprising character of its people.
That same region produced one of the great episodes of colonial resistance: in 1762-1763, taking advantage of the British occupation of Manila, Diego Silang led a rebellion in Ilocos that went as far as setting up its own government in Vigan; after his assassination, his widow, Gabriela Silang, took command of the troops and kept fighting until she was captured and executed, becoming one of the first heroines of Philippine history. In 1999, UNESCO declared Vigan a World Heritage Site. That it survived is almost a miracle: it escaped destruction in the Second World War and, later, property speculation, thanks to its residents' determination to preserve it.
At the country's northern tip, closer to Taiwan than to Luzon, floats the small archipelago of Batanes, the most remote and northernmost part of the Philippines. Its green hills dropping into a rough sea, its stone houses and its lonely lighthouses give it a feel many compare to Ireland or Scotland. It is home to the Ivatan people, of Austronesian origin, who developed a culture adapted to an extreme environment: Batanes lies right in the path of Pacific typhoons and is hit by fierce storms several times a year.
From that struggle with nature came its distinctive architecture: Ivatan houses with thick stone-and-lime walls and densely tied thatched roofs, designed to withstand hurricane-force winds, are recognised heritage and a candidate for the UNESCO list. The Ivatan also developed a remarkable ethic of community cooperation and traditional systems for preserving food and forecasting the weather, essential for surviving in such an isolated place.
Batanes was formally incorporated into the Spanish crown only in 1783, very late, mainly because of its strategic value on the galleon route and in the face of other powers' advances. Under Spain its capital, Basco, was founded. Its remoteness kept it out of almost all the great upheavals of Philippine history, and today it is known for its low crime rate and strong sense of community: a corner where the archipelago comes to an end, facing the open ocean.
Between the northern mountains and the capital stretch the plains of Central Luzon, the country's great rice bowl and, for that very reason, the stage for its biggest social tensions. Here, in provinces such as Cavite, Bulacan and Pampanga, the 1896 revolution caught fire most strongly: it was in Kawit, Cavite, that Aguinaldo proclaimed independence in 1898, and in Malolos, Bulacan, that the First Philippine Republic was set up. In many ways, the region is the political cradle of the modern nation.
Those same plains were also a land of agrarian conflict. The farmers who grew the rice rarely owned the land they worked, which was concentrated in the hands of a few families. That resentment gave rise, in the 1940s, to the Hukbalahap rebellion, the peasant and communist guerrilla movement that first fought the Japanese and then rose up against the independent state. The underlying problem —access to land— was never fully solved and remains a central issue in Philippine politics.
Nature left its most spectacular mark in 1991, when Mount Pinatubo, in Zambales, erupted after centuries of calm. It was one of the largest eruptions of the 20th century: it threw out so much ash and gas that it cooled the climate of the entire planet for a couple of years. The eruption buried whole towns, forced hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate and also hastened the closure of the US military base at Clark. It was a brutal reminder of the forces that constantly shape life in this Ring of Fire archipelago.
Mindanao, the great island of the south, is the exception to almost all of Philippine colonial history. While Luzon and the Visayas were conquered and Christianised in the 16th century, much of Mindanao remained under the power of the Muslim sultanates of Maguindanao and Sulu, and of the confederations around Lake Lanao. The Spaniards called those Muslims 'Moros', and called the struggle to subdue them the 'Moro wars': a conflict that lasted more than three centuries and that Spain never fully won.
The sultanates were organised states, with fleets, trade and armies, capable of resisting and striking back. For centuries, expeditions of Moro warriors sailed up the archipelago to raid the Christian towns of the north, and Spain responded with fortresses and campaigns that rarely achieved lasting control. Only in the 19th century, with steamships, was Spain finally able to break the naval power of the sultanates, but when Spanish rule came to an end in 1898, much of Mindanao was still, in practice, unincorporated Muslim land.
That history left a deep mark. The Americans, and later the independent Philippine state, tried to integrate Mindanao by promoting the mass migration of Christian settlers from the north, which transformed the island's demographics and turned Muslims — and the indigenous Lumad peoples — into minorities across much of their ancestral lands. Out of that dispossession and that tension would come, in the second half of the 20th century, one of the longest armed conflicts in Asia. It is a subject best handled with precision and without oversimplification, recognising the real grievances of different sides.
Davao, the great city of the south, at the foot of Mount Apo — the highest peak in the Philippines, at almost 3,000 metres — is a good example of how Mindanao was transformed in the 20th century. The region was home to indigenous Lumad peoples, such as the Bagobo, and to Muslim communities, but from the time of American rule and independence onwards it opened up to waves of settlers from the Visayas and Luzon, drawn by fertile, cheap land.
A peculiar chapter of that history is Davao's Japanese community. In the early 20th century, thousands of Japanese labourers arrived to work on the abaca plantations — 'Manila hemp', a fibre used to make rope — and formed one of the largest Japanese colonies in South-East Asia, with their own schools, shops and temples. That presence had a dark side during the Second World War, when the community became tied to the occupation, and it all but disappeared after Japan's defeat.
Davao grew into one of the largest cities in the country by area and the great economic hub of the south, famous for its exotic fruit — the durian, with its pungent smell, is almost its emblem — and as the home of the Philippine eagle, the national bird of prey, one of the largest and most endangered in the world. In recent decades, Davao gained national prominence as the political base of Rodrigo Duterte, the city's mayor for many years before he became president in 2016, with a style and methods as popular as they were controversial.
Not all of Mindanao is Muslim. The north and east of the island — regions such as Cagayan de Oro, Butuan and Surigao — were Christianised and stayed culturally closer to the Visayas, with which they share language and traditions. Butuan, in fact, is one of the oldest settlements in the country: it is where the famous balangay boats, more than a thousand years old, were found, proof of a seafaring and trading culture long before the Spaniards, and its name already appears in medieval Chinese chronicles.
Off that northern coast floats Camiguin, a small island of intense nature, known for having more volcanoes per square kilometre than almost anywhere else in the world. Its history is shaped by the fire of the earth: in the late 19th century, the eruption of the Vulcan Daan volcano destroyed the old town of Catarman and sank part of the coast, leaving a cemetery under the water; the large cross planted there afterwards still rises out of the sea and is today one of the island's symbols.
This northern strip shows the other face of Mindanao: an island that is also a child of colonial Catholicism and of the living geology of the archipelago, with hot springs, waterfalls and volcanoes that remind you that here the earth is never entirely still. It is the Mindanao that stayed within the Christian Filipino world, and that for a long time turned its back, geographically and mentally, on the Muslim half of its own island.
At the far north-eastern end of Mindanao, facing the open Pacific, Siargao went from being a remote island of fishermen and coconut palms to the surfing capital of the Philippines. Its most famous wave, Cloud 9, a powerful barrel that breaks over a reef, put it on the world surfing map from the 1980s and 1990s, when foreign surfers discovered the potential of these coasts battered by ocean swell.
At heart, Siargao's story is that of many Philippine islands: centuries of modest life tied to the sea and the coconut — Mindanao is a major producer of copra, the dried flesh of the coconut — followed by a transformation sped up by tourism in recent decades. That change brought prosperity, but also the usual problems of rapid growth: pressure on water, waste and land.
Siargao has also known the fury of the weather. In December 2021, Super Typhoon Rai — called Odette in the Philippines — hit the island head-on, along with much of the south and the Visayas, causing enormous destruction and hundreds of deaths. The rebuilding once again highlighted how vulnerable these coastal communities are to typhoons that, with climate change, are becoming more intense. Siargao thus sums up the present of so many corners of the archipelago: natural beauty, a tourism boom and a difficult coexistence with an increasingly dangerous ocean.
The second half of the 20th century left Mindanao scarred by a long and painful armed conflict. The migration of Christian settlers, the dispossession of land and the political marginalisation of Muslims led, in the 1970s, to the uprising of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) and, later, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), which demanded autonomy or independence for the Bangsamoro people. The war, with its decades of fighting, displacement and victims on all sides, left hundreds of thousands dead and displaced over the years. It is a history that calls for sobriety: there were genuine historical grievances, and there was also violence that hit the civilian population hard.
The road to peace was slow and full of setbacks. There were partial agreements, broken truces and tragic episodes, such as the siege of the city of Marawi in 2017, when armed groups claiming allegiance to the Islamic State took the city and triggered months of fighting and its near-total destruction. Even so, the main negotiation, between the government and the MILF, moved forward.
In 2019, after a plebiscite, the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM) was created, an autonomous government with broad powers for the Muslim-majority provinces, the result of decades of negotiation. It is the most serious attempt to resolve through politics a conflict that had withstood military solutions. Its consolidation is still under way and faces enormous challenges — poverty, armed clans, mistrust — but it represents the greatest hope for lasting peace in a land that had spent more than four centuries in conflict with power coming from the north.
Palawan, the long island stretching towards Borneo between the South China Sea and the Sulu Sea, holds the oldest human traces in the country. In the Tabon Caves, in the municipality of Quezon, archaeologists found human remains around 47,000 years old —the so-called 'Tabon Man'— along with stone tools, pottery and burial jars. Because of that antiquity, Palawan is known as the 'cradle of Philippine civilisation'.
Those first inhabitants probably arrived overland, during ice ages when sea levels were lower and Palawan was almost connected to Borneo; in fact, the island's wildlife —with species related to those of Borneo— is different from that of the rest of the Philippines, which is why biologists treat it as a separate region. On top of that ancient settlement came the indigenous peoples who still live on the island: the Tagbanua, the Pala'wan and the Batak, keepers of traditions of carving, weaving and rituals tied to nature.
One of Tabon's most precious finds is the 'Manunggul Jar', a burial jar some 2,800 years old whose lid shows two figures sailing in a boat towards the afterlife: an image that sums up, in clay, these peoples' relationship with the sea and with death, and which is today an icon of national heritage. Palawan is, in a sense, the deep bedrock of Philippine history.
For centuries, Palawan was a contested frontier land. The north and much of the coast fell within the orbit of the Sultanate of Sulu, whose Muslim influence reached from the archipelago of the same name; trade, raids and ties of vassalage bound Palawan to Sulu and to Borneo. Spain, by contrast, took a long time to gain a foothold on the island, which was long, forested, sparsely populated and far from the colonial centre in Manila.
The Spanish founded missions and garrisons on the east coast to watch the route and hold back the raids, but their rule was always weak and peripheral. Palawan's own geography —a mountain range running the length of the island, dense jungle, mangrove coasts— made it hard to control and kept many of its indigenous peoples outside the colonial system until recent times.
Under American rule and later in the independent republic, Palawan remained a frontier, now an internal one: a destination for migration from other overcrowded islands, with settlers arriving to clear new land. That last-frontier status explains why Palawan still keeps huge stretches of practically untouched jungle and sea, and why it is today one of the provinces with the greatest biodiversity and the highest share of protected areas in the country. History left it on the sidelines; nature was grateful for it.
Puerto Princesa, the provincial capital, was founded as a Spanish settlement in the late 19th century, in 1872, with the aim of strengthening the colonial presence on an elusive island. Its name honours a princess of the Spanish crown. Over time it became the gateway to Palawan and its main city, today one of the largest in the world by municipal area, because it takes in a huge stretch of jungle and coastline.
Its natural treasure is the underground river, inside the Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park: one of the longest navigable underground rivers in the world, which flows through a spectacular cave of stalactites and stalagmites before emptying straight into the sea. It was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999 and later chosen as one of the New Seven Wonders of Nature, which made it the island's big tourist magnet.
Puerto Princesa also carries the memory of war. In December 1944, in the final stretch of the Japanese occupation, one of the most remembered atrocities of the conflict in the Philippines took place there: the massacre of American prisoners of war, burned and killed by their captors out of fear of an Allied landing. Only a handful managed to survive. That dark episode now sits alongside the peaceful image of a city that presents itself as a model of eco-tourism and urban cleanliness.
In northern Palawan, among the Calamian Islands, Coron combines two very different stories beneath the same turquoise sea. The first is that of its original inhabitants, the Tagbanua of Coron, who hold ancestral domain over the island and its sacred lakes. The most famous, Kayangan Lake, and the crystal-clear waters of its coves are managed by the Tagbanua community itself, which won legal recognition of its ancestral territory, land and water: a pioneering case of indigenous rights over an area of great tourist value.
The second story lies underwater. In September 1944, during the liberation campaign, US aircraft located and attacked a Japanese fleet anchored in Coron Bay, sinking around twenty ships —tankers and auxiliary vessels— within a few hours. Those wrecks, now covered in coral and marine life, turned Coron into one of the best places on the planet for diving among Second World War remains. Diving among those hulls is, quite literally, exploring an underwater graveyard of the war in the Pacific.
So in Coron the memory of a global conflict sits alongside that of a people who resisted and managed to keep their land. The karst landscape of Coron Island —limestone cliffs plunging into the sea— completes a corner where natural, indigenous and military history overlap beneath the surface of the water.
At the far north-western tip of the island, El Nido guards one of the most dazzling seascapes in the world: the Bacuit archipelago, a maze of limestone cliffs, hidden lagoons of emerald-green water and dozens of islets. The name comes from the nests of the swiftlets, birds whose edible nests were once gathered from the caves in the cliffs and sold to the Chinese market, an ancient trade that links this remote corner to the old Asian routes.
For almost all of its history, El Nido was a handful of isolated fishing villages, hard to reach and kept alive by the sea. Its transformation is recent: only in the last decades of the 20th century, with the arrival of tourism, did it go from being a secret shared by backpackers and divers to a world-famous destination. Much of its surroundings is protected within a managed resource area, in an attempt to balance tourism growth with the conservation of its reefs and forests.
El Nido sums up the dilemma of Palawan today. The whole province is famous as the 'last frontier' of the Philippines for its almost untouched nature, but that same appeal exposes it to the pressure of mass tourism, unchecked construction and pollution. Palawan's history was that of a land left on the sidelines, which is exactly why it kept its natural wealth; its future depends on whether it can protect that wealth now that the whole world wants to see it.
The Visayas, the cluster of islands in the centre of the archipelago, were the setting for the first contact and the first colonisation. Cebu in particular is where the modern history of the Philippines begins. Magellan arrived there in 1521, and there, on neighbouring Mactan, he died at the hands of Lapu-Lapu. And it was there that Legazpi returned in 1565 to found the country's first permanent Spanish settlement, San Miguel, the seed of the city of Cebu, the oldest in the Philippines.
Before that, Cebu had been a prosperous trading rajahnate, the kingdom of Sugbu, ruled by Rajah Humabon when Magellan arrived. It was a busy port, in contact with China and South-East Asia, and it never lost that commercial calling: today Cebu is the country's second-largest metropolitan area and a major hub for shipping, industry and air and sea connections to the rest of the islands.
Two powerful symbols survive from that first encounter. One is the Santo Niño de Cebú, the image of the Child Jesus that Magellan gave to Humabon's wife in 1521 and which, according to tradition, was found intact decades later among the ashes left by Legazpi's expedition; it is the oldest and most revered Catholic relic in the country. The other is Magellan's Cross, planted when the first converts were baptised. Every January, the Sinulog, one of the biggest religious festivals in the Philippines, revolves around that devotion.
From Cebu, the Catholic faith spread throughout the Visayas, which became one of the religious hearts of the country. The friars built churches of coral stone, many of them fortified to withstand raids, and organised village life around the parish. Several of those churches, such as those of Bohol and Iloilo, are among the most beautiful and oldest in the Philippines, although some were badly damaged by the earthquake that struck the central Visayas in 2013.
Before the conquest, the Visayans, speakers of languages such as Cebuano and Hiligaynon, formed a vigorous maritime society of seafarers, traders and warriors, with remarkable traditions of tattooing — the first Spaniards called them 'pintados' because of their tattooed bodies — and of shipbuilding. Under Spain, that energy was channelled into trade, export agriculture and fishing.
For centuries the Visayas suffered the scourge of raids by the Moros of the south, who sailed up from Sulu and Mindanao to attack coastal towns and seize captives for the slave market. Watchtowers and bulwarks were built along the coasts against that threat, and village life was marked by constant alarm. That long history of conflict between the Christianised north and the Muslim south is one of the keys to understanding the tensions that still run through the country.
Bohol, the island of the curious Chocolate Hills and the tiny tarsiers, holds two major chapters of Philippine history. The first is the Sandugo, the 'blood compact' sealed in 1565 by the local chief Datu Sikatuna and Miguel López de Legazpi, who mixed a few drops of their blood in wine and drank it as a sign of friendship and alliance. It is one of the founding symbols of the relationship — and the clash — between Filipinos and Spaniards, and today it is remembered as an emblem of hospitality and of keeping one's word.
The second chapter is one of resistance. Bohol was the scene of the longest rebellion in the whole of Philippine colonial history: that of Francisco Dagohoy, which broke out in 1744 over a grievance against the clergy and lasted 85 years, until 1829. The rebels took refuge in the mountains of the interior and set up a free community that the Spanish failed to subdue for almost a century. Earlier, in 1621-1622, the island had already seen another uprising, led by Tamblot, an indigenous religious leader who tried to restore the ancestral cults in the face of the new faith.
That reputation as an untameable land sits alongside the peaceful image of Bohol today. Its more than a thousand conical hills, which turn brown in the dry season and gave rise to the name Chocolate Hills, and its forests where the tarsier, one of the smallest primates in the world, still survives, have made it a top-tier nature destination. The 2013 earthquake damaged towns and historic churches, but it also, curiously, brought new faults to the surface and lifted part of the land, yet another reminder of the living geology of these islands.
Off the north-western tip of the island of Panay, in the province of Aklan, tiny Boracay became the symbol of Philippine beach tourism. Its four kilometres of brilliant white sand — White Beach — and its postcard sunsets took it from an almost unknown fishing island in the 1970s to one of the most famous destinations in South-East Asia. Much of the island is the ancestral home of the Ati people, the first Negrito inhabitants of Panay, whose land rights were often trampled by the tourism boom.
Panay, the largest island in the region, has its own historical mythology: the legend of the Maragtas, which tells of the arrival of ten datus from Borneo who supposedly bought the island from the Ati in exchange for a golden hat and a necklace, an episode celebrated every year at the Ati-Atihan festival in Kalibo, considered the 'mother' of all Philippine carnivals. Historians debate how much of that story is fact and how much later literary tradition, but its cultural weight is enormous.
Boracay also offers a contemporary lesson. In 2018, the Philippine government took a drastic decision: it closed the island to tourism for six months to clean it up, after years of unchecked growth had turned its waters into a dumping ground for sewage. The 'rehabilitation' of Boracay became a worldwide case study on the limits of mass tourism and on what it costs to repair the damage done to a paradise.
Beyond the big names, the Visayas are a mosaic of islands where life has always revolved around the sea. Siquijor, the small island the Spaniards called the 'island of fire' because of the glow of its fireflies, carries a reputation as a land of healers, sorcerers and rituals that still attracts and unsettles visitors, a sign of how pre-Christian beliefs survived beneath Catholicism. Dumaguete, on neighbouring Negros, is a friendly university city, home to one of the oldest universities in the country and a base for diving on the reefs of Apo.
Negros, the sugar island, has an intense social history: during the boom of the sugar-cane plantations in the 19th and 20th centuries, a landowning aristocracy — the 'hacenderos' — took shape alongside a mass of rural workers, the sacadas, whose harsh conditions fuelled agrarian conflicts that continue to this day. The contrast between the wealth of sugar and the poverty of the countryside made Negros a symbol of Philippine inequality.
These islands depend on the sea for almost everything: fishing, transport, trade and, increasingly, tourism. And the sea also brings the greatest threats. In November 2013, Typhoon Haiyan — known in the Philippines as Yolanda — one of the most powerful cyclones ever recorded, swept across the eastern Visayas, leaving more than six thousand dead and immense devastation, above all in the city of Tacloban. It was a reminder, as tragic as the earthquake of that same year, that living on these islands means living at the mercy of the sea that gives them everything.
Hardly anything that happened to Philippines happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
